Today has been a supine day. In an elaborate, isometric act I have been typing this on a full-sized laptop computer while remaining in such a position, without aid of pillow or shim or complex system of pulley and rope. Time is an isolate immobile axis. My elbows are brought, by degrees, to a clean, geometric pain.

I spent a block of supineness watching Youtube videos of Jonathan Blow talking; I counted no fewer than fourteen instantiations of the term ‘walled garden’ over videos spanning greater than a decade. His hairline jogs forward and back. Somewhere in 2012 he fills out, arms newly hardened under taught cotton tech-logo tees. I scrape the literary works he cyclically invokes around half a dozen times or so each in various interviews, talks, recorded streams. Here are a few: “Einstein’s Dreams,” “Gödel, Escher, Bach,” Calvino and Borges and Wittgenstein and Eco. Their vector sum, their con-stellation, could tell me his precise age, his taste in women, his closely held fears and embarrassments, whether he was bullied or not, whether he was hugged enough by his mother—such is their specificity to a certain kind of American man, I think. He likes calculus. He differentiates between calculus and ‘a’ calculus and ‘the’ calculus. He is careful to say that ‘the data are’ and correctly employs ‘ipso facto.’ The term ‘walled garden’ or WG appears in Calvino’s “Invisible Cities,” in a way, as the setting of the frame-story: the palace of the great Khan. While safe, comfortable, consistent, WGs can be misleading, claustrophobic, dishonest, if not insidious. Blow doesn’t admit this outright. He seems to love them, I think, at least a little anyway, at least when they cordon his own ideas. He just seems selfish, not profound. When WGs shelter every author he has ever cried to in private, every girlfriend he’s ever actually loved, then they are meaningful. He seems really, really lonely. When they are not his WGs, his careful craftwork, his tender private preservations and fantasies, then they are instead cruel abbreviations, apparently, procrustean nightmares and mind-poisons. I infer this from his endless complaints—they are not merely inaccurate but actively malicious, malignant, carciniferous and morally oblate. When an audience member leans low into a microphone during a Q&A to query him for an example of something he hates, Blow makes ecclesiastical silence before putting nomine to malum: ‘Farmville.’

I enjoy these videos immensely. I think they are so funny. Their depressingness is alkaline and healthful and sturdy. I almost emerge from supineness even, but don’t. Blow’s raison d’être is convincing listeners that the things they think are fun are not really fun, and he does it in a guru-ish way, modifying sentences with vulgate punchy verbs indigenous to Palo Alto and Mountain View, center-embedding clause after clause—an emesis of apothegms from one of the eight or so books he holds close. In other words he is the ultimate buzzkill downerboi, though whether or not he is correct is outweighed by the possibility that he might be correct, leading many attendees, many of them in their early twenties, many of them men, many of them needful and alone and uncaressed, toward acolytic journeys of purposeful self-unsatisfaction, most of which I suspect is taken out not on the design og obscure and unplayable indie titles from steam.com, but instead on their Berkeley, Davis, or UCSF esthete GFs.

I was struck supine because I found handwritten urls on the inside front cover of my boyfriend’s beaten copy of GEB, a yellowed paperback whose facing card-stock had gone rounded at the corners and whose spine, cheaply glued, opened discretely to thumbworn pages. The urls point to gamedev videos, all of them, about half with Blow and the others a potpourri of basic physics tutorials with depressing voiceovers expositing on ‘squish’ and ‘float’ of various ‘styles’ of jump, double jump, dash, and slide. ‘Overshot’ to imply weight or solidity, ‘telegraphing’ to ensure proper and natural reaction time, ‘crispness’ and ‘snap,’ bounce, ease in and ease out. Constant acceleration kinematic equations. Edge detection. Collision mapping. Ray marching. Byzantine fault tolerance. Concerned parents have it the wrong way around: the language of violence is video games.

I perused the rest of my boyfriend’s modest shelf, flipping to stop on notes in overfat 1mm Pilot G2 carmine ink, though most were not informative. He likes to use exclamation points, small 1em vertical dashes to demarcate lines containing unusual vocabulary. Expletives in the margins of crushing passages. Occasionally an asterisk with another page number beside it—checking the referenced page yields only another asterisk, pointing aimlessly back, the two apparently in commune toward some secret analogy I cannot extract.

That I am skeptical, that I am repulsed, that I am supine now for hours and hours, would seem to be my fault. I am not tough enough, maybe, or feel I have lost something? What have I been deprived from that isn't completely selfish to have ever wanted? This leveling force, perverse and omnipresent, like gravity, like teen grief, might just be some endogenous cruel adolescent sebum that I alone produce.

I am supine because my boyfriend works in inference and probability and regression and error correction and multiplexing and frequency hopping and wavelet transforms but has also evidently been spending his limited free time (presumably resulting in some degree of neglect toward me, though I cannot be sure this neglect was unwanted, unappreciated—that neglect is here a negative thing) developing a game, or the idea of a game, and perhaps even communicating with others developing said games, etc., apparently in an attempt to escape his perception of his upbringing as decidedly un-profound and pedestrian, which he has admitted to me, though the connection between game development and an escape from this sort of self-perception is unclear and possibly impossible and weird and something which he has not admitted to me, but which I would guess that he would fear and loathe to admit to me. For me to disinter this from him and hold it up to the light might be crushing. He liked that I did not know this.

The sun sets on my supine day because I know that he took with him his notebooks, his computer, the little scraps of Rhodia paper he keeps on his nightstand for night thoughts, he said, though he never implied they were connected to his dreams, only his research and its crystalline coolness, his advisor’s loomingness, though as I see now this was untrue and the actual state of affairs was something much more troubling, something unfortunately literarily mired and emotionally questionable, embarrasing, even—and that this was now gone from my knowing, from even my possibility of knowing, perhaps, if bad comes to worse.

Another rant by Blow. My elbows hurt so much I don’t think they will ever unbend, and the laptop’s foot bites into my plexus something fierce. I hate my body. It is the fact, Blow says, that we have engineered our way around boredom, to a certain point. We have engineered our way around frustration as well, he says, not to mention other things. Take some pointless thing and we can make it compelling, make it compulsive, and squeeze money and time out of people who believe, deep down, that they are having fun and engaging in a worthwhile transaction. But boredom is a healthy response to unproductive situations, and—

June falls asleep. Her phone buzzes but she does not check it.